Easy Chocolate Play Dough Recipe

Here is an easy and delicious no-cook recipe for chocolate play dough! Make this super simple no-cook chocolate play dough recipe with your preschoolers and school aged children for a fun sensory or Valentine’s day activity or to give as a take-home party favour gift idea too.

It’s been a whole year since we first made chocolate play dough and it was LONG overdue that we made some and played with it again! What were we thinking waiting so long? This stuff is the BEST! It looks great, smells wonderful and prompts so much imaginative play, and only takes 4 minutes to make. Perfect!

Recipe:

2 cups plain flour (all purpose)

1 cup salt

1/2 cup cocoa powder

2 tbsps vegetable oil

2 tbsps cream of tartar

2 cups of boiling water

4 drops of glycerine (optional extra for increased shine and stretch)

Method:

Combine all of the dry ingredients in a bowl

Stir in the vegetable oil

Mix together

Stir in the boiling water (adult only) and mix until combined

When it has cooled a little, knead it on a clean surface until it loses all stickiness and becomes smooth and stretchy. No residue should come off on your fingers. If it is still sticky add a little more flour, if too dry and crumbly add more water, a tablespoon at a time.

I purposefully saved the most ENORMOUS chocolate box from Christmas and dutifully ate all the chocs up so that we could play play play! Just like the last time we made this, we set about rolling and squishing the dough to make pretend chocolates to fill up the box. There was lots of discussion about how to fit the dough into the correctly shaped hole, as some were ovals, some circles, some square and others rectangles. Cakie was very good at recognising the shapes but found it much harder to make the 3D shapes to match. We worked on those together and it was a great challenge, both in terms of maths (awareness of shape and space) and fine motor skills (moulding and forming shapes.)

They have both been playing with this non-stop as the smell is SO delicious! So far they have made boxes of chocolates, rolled out cookie-dough, made brownies and cooked them in the “oven”, and formed them into chocolate fairy cakes with Hama bead sprinkles and candles on top! We have also had a whole morning role-playing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and putting together a chocolate shop, which have been plenty of wonderful, imaginative fun. I’m exhausted from all the playing!

Learning Links:

creativity: create forms and shapes using malleable materials, pretend one object represents another during pretend play, use imagination to take on a character or role

maths: recognise and name 2D and 3D shapes, create representations of 3D shapes, match and sort by size and shape

literacy: tell stories and remain in role/ character during imaginative play

seriously, I think the chocolate is my fave! My house smelled lovely when we made ours and the girls have really enjoyed playing with it and making chocolates, donuts, brownies, cupcakes, etc. Has me wanting to bake up lots of goodies!

What a wonderful idea – I can’t wait to do it with my granddaughters … however, you had me drooling with the Thornton’s box. I’m a voluntary exile in San Francisco and I so miss those wonderful chocolates. Love your blog … thank you, thank you!

Oh WOW, that is cute! I’m thinking we’re just gonna have to have a little chocolate factory and watch Willie Wonka next week at our house. First, I need to buy and devour chocolate…you know, for the kids’ sake;)

Thank you SOOOO much for this idea. I made it for my preschool classroom and they LOVE it. My own kids at home were begging for their “very own batch”. Then I made 3 batches for my son’s Kindergarten class. Lots of Chocolate Playdough love happening here in Vermont!

this is the best idea! tried it and the boys loved it for days and days! wish you lived near us because your life with those cute boys looks like such fun!!! you have such great ideas that let kids explore and be free!

A big thank you from all the kids at the inhome daycare I work at We spent a good 45 minutes making cookies, candies, ice cream cones… you name it, out of your fabulous chocolate playdough (and your plain playdough recipe, which I added a splash of almond extract to. The kids thought it was cherry playdough )